Abstract
Hempel is not the first philosopher to have held that causal explanations are deductive inferences of a special sort: in the Posterior Analytics 1 Aristotle distinguishes a special sort of deductive inference — the demonstrative syllogism — in these terms:
By demonstration I mean a syllogism productive of scientific knowledge, a syllogism, that is, the grasp of which is eo ipso such knowledge.
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Book 1, chapter 2. All citations from this work are from the Oxford translation.
I leave to one side the deductive-statistical explanations discussed in Part 3.2 of Aspects of Scientific Explanation,The Free Press, New York, 1965.
The notion of practical certainty operative in this account of the ‘beautiful’ cases of statistical explanation is problematical but, I think, defensible. Example: There would be serious trouble with that notion if, given a probability greater than 0 (no matter how slightly greater), one could name a prize so great that the prospect of getting that prize with that probability is not negligible. But I take it that such problems as the St. Petersburg paradox already force us to realize that if Bayesian decision-theory is to work, there must be a finite upper bound on the utilities of the things the agent can envisage as prizes.
The lines from Louis MacNeice are the last two of his ‘Bagpipe Music’.
I would prefer to avoid this second kind of probability and speak simply of the statistical probability of the conclusion; indeed, p(C) is 1 —2 –n,i.e., the probability measure defined in the premiss assigns to the conclusion precisely the value which the inductive probability measure c assigns to the conclusion conditionally on the premiss. But let us stay with Hempel’s way of talking.
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© 1969 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Jeffrey, R.C. (1969). Statistical Explanation vs. Statistical Inference. In: Rescher, N. (eds) Essays in Honor of Carl G. Hempel. Synthese Library, vol 24. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1466-2_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1466-2_6
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